1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus having a collecting container which contains the toner collected from an image bearing member.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is a cleaning unit as a conventional technique for cleaning the toner on an image bearing member of an image forming apparatus. The image forming apparatus disclosed in the Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H05-173457 has a brush roller for collecting the toner on a photosensitive drum, and the toner collected by the brush roller is pushed into a cleaning unit. The photosensitive drum and the cleaning unit are arranged side by side. If there is a biased amount of toner on the photosensitive drum in the longitudinal direction, the toner is pushed into the cleaning unit with the bias. If a large biased amount of toner is collected at a position apart from a toner detection unit in the cleaning unit, then the problem that the toner flows from the position where the large biased amount of toner has been collected before the full toner is detected is recognized. To solve this problem, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H05-173457 describes that the toner in the cleaning container is collected by moving the toner immediately below the toner detection unit.
However, there can be a result of detecting a large amount of collected toner although there is a small amount of toner in the cleaning unit when the toner is automatically conveyed to the detection unit of, for example, the image forming apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H05-173457.
The present invention has been developed to solve the foregoing problem.
There is also Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-148884 having the configuration of conveying toner in a cleaning unit, but the application does not originally have the problem from biased toner in the longitudinal direction of an image bearing member.